Same old stories? Trade unions and protest in Italy in 2011

The demand for politics over markets, a key message in the Occupy and
Indignados movements, is also key here. A considerable drop in trust is clear:
trust in all national institutions and political actors (parliament, parties,
and trade unions).

The history of Italian protest is certainly a rich one – this is the
country that produced one of the largest Communist parties in western Europe, along
with a strong and politicized labour movement, often ready to join forces with
other social movements. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Italian ‘long
autumn’ was compared to the ‘short French May’ as the student movement was
accompanied by a widespread cycle of protest. In the 1980s and, especially, the
1990s, the collapse of ‘real socialism’ and the gradual strengthening of
neoliberal views had obvious repercussions on the Italian Left, but in the
2000s Italy harboured an extremely vital movement for global justice - the
strength and influence of those mobilizations culminated in the hosting of the first
European
Social Forum (ESF) in Italy.
Since 2010, students have protested frequently and intensively against
what they consider as attacks on public education, including budget cuts and
fees increases. On several occasions, especially during innovative ‘lessons on
the street’ they were joined by concerned parents and teachers as well as by
the population at large.

Notwithstanding all this, the most visible protests to sweep the global
North, in the forms of what have been labelled the ‘Occupy’ movement and the
‘Indignados’ in Southern Europe, saw only a weak following in Italy. Some camps
were set up in Italy’s main cities, but they usually remained small in
proportion. The Global Day of Action on October 15 saw hundreds of thousands of
demonstrators in Rome, but the day ended in violent outbursts that neither the
protest organizers nor the police were able to control. So what was going on
with protest in Italy in 2011? Were things really as quiet as they seemed? In
our study we surveyed all the protests reported in Italy in 2011 in the
centre-left newspaper La Repubblica,
looked at documents and websites from social movement organizations and also
drew on information from surveys administered during annual protest marches
throughout the year.

What we found from our overview of protest throughout the year seemed to
resemble protest as usual, albeit with much focus on attacks on social rights
in a time of austerity, yet the survey showed a surprising change in the
attitudes of union activists.

Unsung trade unions

After scouring La Repubblica, we detected a total of
172 separate protest events that took place in Italy in 2011 – enough for a
good overview of the most visible contentious actions taking place. Of those
protests, 2 out of 5 were organised by informal groups, more than one third by
trade unions, and one third by other formal associations. Trade unions were
therefore the single most active civil society actor organising protest in the
country in 2011 (since the other classifications are aggregates). Most of those
unions were rank-and-file organisations, present both in firms and in new
professions (such as call centres) that are generally ignored by traditional
unions. However, among the traditional unions the leftist union Cgil (Italian
General Confederation of Labour) and in particular its metalworkers’ branch (Fiom) mobilized in around one third of the events
where a union intervened.

This finding on the
prevalence of unions also held out in terms of the social groups represented in
the protest events: around one third were initiated by workers. The issues of
protest too were dominated by work and labour, 16.9% of those identified to be
exact. This salience of labour issues is connected both to the economic crisis
and the new management of FIAT which has transformed the automobile group into
a transnational firm less interested in protecting its Italian identity. The
current manager, Sergio Marchionne, has gradually broken up the traditional
system of negotiations with Italian unions, national government and even with
the enterprise association, threatening the dismissal of non-profitable firms
like Termini
Imerese, imposing harsher working conditions via referendum, and even
firing unionized workers. This has translated into a harsh conflict involving
demonstrations, strikes and judicial trials. New Prime Minister Mario Monti has
also shown little inclination towards concerted action with trade unions.

Mario Monti meets head of Fiat Sergio Marchionne in front of new Fiat Panda, March 2012. Demotix/Simona Granati. All rights reserved.

Although trade
unions were not the only actors present in Italian protest in 2011, they were
certainly important enough to merit interest, especially in view of their
historically strong role in fomenting contention in the country. What is more,
the attitudes of those who participated in protests were drastically critical
of institutional policies that addressed austerity through a radicalization of
neoliberal recipes of budget cuts, deregulation and the liberalization of
markets (including, once again, the labour market). This is what clearly
emerges from surveys carried out at trade union and precarious workers’ marches
in 2011: the Labour Day (LD) marches in Florence and Milan (EuroMayDay), and a
national general strike (GS) in Florence on 6 May. If we compare these to
similar surveys carried out at protest events at the turn of the century such
as the Genoa anti-G8 protest in 2001, the first ESF in Florence in 2002 and the
Global Day of Action against the war on Iraq on February 15 2003, we note a
clear tidal change in the opinions of union members in Italy (especially given that the events surveyed at the
beginning of the century were if anything more ‘radical’ arenas than trade
union marches, albeit not the EuroMayDay march).

Plummeting
trust

First, we observed a low (if variable) degree
of trust in different institutions among the marchers. Trust was lowest for the
national government, growing only very slightly when looking at the national
parliament (only 2.4% for EuroMayDay; 5.9% for the GS and 10.7% for LD). This
is all the more true for political parties and trade unions. The percentage
that trusted political parties moved from 1.6% for the EuroMayDay parade to
15.2% for the LD; it is significant that even the GS participants expressed minimal
trust in parties (5.9%). Trust in trade unions is higher, but still low for
demonstrations called by the unions themselves: only in the LD was trust in
unions expressed by slightly more than half of participants (52.3%).

Comparing these findings with the earlier data, a considerable drop in
trust is clear: trust in all national institutions and political actors (parliament,
parties, and trade unions) is lower than registered at the demonstrations we
surveyed at the beginning of the decade. The decline of trust in political
parties and the parliament is the most striking, dropping from about a quarter
of marchers to just 7% for political parties and from about one fifth to just
6% for the parliament, if we compare last year’s data with the anti-G8 protest
in 2001.

Marchers asked for power to be handed back to political institutions. Politics
over markets, a key message in the Occupy and Indignados movements, is also key
here. Only between 11% (for the GS) and 26% (for the EuroMayDay parade) believe that
neoliberal globalization can provide opportunities for economic growth, while
more than 80% (over all demonstrations) think that globalization increases
inequalities, and even more (86%) believe it requires institutional control
through the building of institutions of global governance (79% for EuroMayDay,
87% for LD and 90% for GS).

While extremely critical of the workings of existing institutions, activists
did however express a very eager quest for politics - to the point of demanding
increased power for the very institutions they mistrust. When moving from any assessment
of responsibility to potential solutions, they agree that it is necessary to
strengthen all levels of governance. On the national level in particular
positions are rather different from those expressed by ESF activists in 2002,
and the national level is the only one that registers virtually no difference
between the three demonstrations. For the other levels, the GS closely mirrors the
total results, with the EuroMayDay scoring approximately 10% lower and LD 10% higher.
On average, among the three demonstrations in 2011, 73.3% of the protestors called
for the EU to be strengthened (compared to 43% at the 2002 ESF) and 70.5% for
the local level of government to be strengthened, while 53.9% favoured
strengthening the national level (compared to 22% for ESF) and 51.3% supported the
building of institutions of world governance (compared to 65% for ESF).

All in all, levels of mistrust and calls for power to be returned to the
political process are therefore substantially high (and apparently growing)
among precarious workers and union members protesting in Italy in 2011.

What this appears to indicate is that while the Italian scenario of
protest was indeed dominated by the usual suspects, trade unions, in 2011,
union members and precarious workers alike share the radical points of view
expressed by the anti-austerity groups that have sprung up across the rest of
Europe: there is a demand for substantive, meaningful politics over markets.

About the authors

Donatella Della Porta is professor of political science and dean of the Institute for Humanities at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, where she also leads the Center on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos). In 2011, she was the recipient of the Mattei Dogan Prize for distinguished achievements in the field of political sociology. She is Honorary Doctor of the universities of Lausanne, Bucharest and Goteborg.

Lorenzo
Mosca is assistant professor at the University of Roma Tre. His
research interests focus on political participation, political communication,
ICTs and e-democracy.

Louisa Parks completed her
PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. Her research thus far has
focused on the impacts of social movement campaigns in the European Union,
transnational NGOs, and Italian activism.

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